Full spoilers follow for The Hunt.
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Universal and Blumhouse Productions’ action-thriller-satire The Hunt has been the subject of its fair share of controversy dating back to last summer. That’s when, in the wake of the tragic mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, the film’s “liberals hunt conservatives” premise led the studio to bump its release date by some six months. The film was subsequently the target of much debate in the media, with even President Trump apparently getting in on the act (although he never specifically referred to the film by name in his comments).
But now that the film is out, it is clear that The Hunt is satirizing the very us vs. them mindset that helped to ignite the controversy over it in the first place. The Hunt’s Red State conservatives and Blue State liberals are mostly extreme caricatures, a trollbot’s idea of what our political divide looks like. Produced by Jason Blum, directed by Craig Zobel, and written by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, The Hunt holds a ghastly mirror up to us and asks, what if?
Of course, coming as it does in part from Lindelof — who is riding high these days on the recent success of his HBO Watchmen series — it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that there’s more to this hunt than at first meets the eye. We spoke to Lindelof about the surprises laced in the film’s script, what he and the team were hoping to say with The Hunt, and much more.
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The Janet Leigh Trick, a.k.a. Who’s Our Main Character Anyway?
The Hunt starts off with a fun bit of cinematic legerdemain where we just don’t know who our main character is for the first 20 minutes of the film or so. As the hunted (regular Joe conservatives) awaken in the secluded zone that the hunters (rich, elite liberals) have set up, we jump from character to character, trying to latch on to somebody we can follow as our identifying character in this insane situation… only to have each potential player shot or blown up or otherwise dispatched.
“It’s now familiar territory to do what they did in Psycho — the Janet Lee, trick as it were, where the hero that you think you are watching gets killed in fairly short order,” says Lindelof, referring to the presumed main character and biggest star of the Alfred Hitchcock classic who surprised audiences at the time by being killed off halfway through the movie. “[Now] we’re now post-Scream, which satirized that very idea. And so it felt like the next version of that twist or storytelling technique was to just do it again.
“Then it was like, ‘Well, O.K., so once Emma [Roberts’ character] dies, well, she’s dead. But now Justin Hartley has got to be the star of this movie. He wouldn’t just come down and do one day [of filming]. … He just exploded. There’s Ike Barinholtz, he looks familiar. I love that guy. He was great in Neighbors. Like, it’s going to be him [who will be our main character]!’ And then he buys it in the gas station. And so I think that the intention was to create a feeling in the audience, the same emotional experience that those hunted had, which is anybody can go at any time. And I’m not going to basically get too attached to any of these people. Because this is a movie where the hero can die.”
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Lindelof says that when the filmmakers were trying to find the “sweet spot” of satire, they came to realize they needed to go over the top for this kind of material. Getting too close to the world that we live in was always a danger, and so depicting a group of (mostly) stereotypes — characters who were also caricatures — became essential. But not all of the characters would fall into that category, and that’s where the player who eventually does wind up being our main character comes in.
“The real key is that you have to find a center, if you’re going to go over the top, and for us the answer was Crystal,” says Lindelof, referring to the character played by Betty Gilpin (GLOW), a kickass ex-military who starts out as one of the hunted but turns the tables on her captors. “Betty Gilpin is just such an amazing actor because she’s taking what’s happening to her very seriously. But at the same time, she has kind of a cynical sense of humor about it.
“She’s incredibly fun to watch, but she’s almost got this attitude of like, ‘I do not want to be in this movie, but now that you’ve put me in the movie, I guess I’m just going to have to kill everybody.’ And so I think that she created that balance between the absurdity of a movie that’s first kill is by a high-heeled shoe and then ends with a 20-minute-long fight sequence in a Nancy Meyer kitchen. But I think that Betty found a way to prevent the movie from floating off into the highest levels of Absurd Town.”
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The Apolitical Will Inherit the Earth
The interesting thing about the Crystal character is that we eventually find out that she apparently was mistakenly chosen for the hunt; she happens to share the name of someone with more extreme political views. And in the end, she is triumphant against those who hunted her, including Hilary Swank’s character, an ex-highflying corporate type who is the ringleader of the hunters. But Crystal is the one character in The Hunt whose political leanings we never really get a sense of.
“It’s possible that she is not a political character,” explains Lindelof. “She clearly identifies as someone who doesn’t want to talk about politics. And that is indicative of a vast number of people who live in this country. We live in a bubble. We consume the media that we consume. And for some of us on both sides, by the way, the political situation in the country is almost all we talk about. But for many, many others, they just don’t care. They care more about feeding their families or keeping their jobs or having to renew their license at the DMV. And the idea of what’s happening in Washington is just not of their concern. And I think that Crystal is a character that speaks for those people, who’s like, ‘Why do I have to pick a team? I’m on team me.’”
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Sort of working as the flipside of the Crystal character is Swank’s Athena. We eventually learn that she didn’t start off as the crazed leader of a human hunting party, but rather saw her life and career ruined by a dumb, joking text message thread with her friends that went public. Whereas Crystal is apparently apolitical, Athena it seems is forced to take sides (very, very extreme sides, yes) due to the pressures of the sharply divided world around her. In so doing, she enters into a downward spiral and becomes the very thing people accused her of being when that text message thread went viral in the first place.
“The question that we were asking is, what happens to someone who gets accused of being a monster,” says Lindelof. “And not just accused of it but it’s believed about them. At a certain point do they just throw up their arms and say, ‘O.K., you want me to be a monster, then that is what I’ll be. If you believe that about me anyway, I might as well just do it.’ And does that speak to [the fact] that there was always a part of them that was already a monster? I think that’s the scariest part of humanity. We have this idea of people are born evil or they’re not born evil. When I find that, moving through life, people make good choices and they make bad choices. But the innate nature of their character is not something that’s predetermined.”
But the problem, according to Lindelof, is that people go on the defensive when they are accused of things, and it becomes very hard to be your best self in that moment.
“In Athena’s case, that becomes a justification for some very, very bad choices,” he says.
The Hunt is in theaters now.
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Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
Source: IGN.com The Hunt: Damon Lindelof Breaks Down the Controversial Moments